c. 1314 CE
Ada: The eighteenth of March, thirteen fourteen. A scaffold stands before Notre-Dame. The papal cardinals read the sentence: Molay and Geoffroy de Charny, perpetual imprisonment.
Theo: Not death. So this should be the quiet ending.
Ada: It should. But Molay and Charny stand up in front of the crowd and take it all back. The confessions were lies, they say, wrung out of them by torture. The order was pure.
Theo: In public? That's suicide.
Ada: It is. Under church law, recanting makes you a relapsed heretic. Philip doesn't even wait for the church courts. That same evening he has them taken to a little island in the Seine, the Ile aux Juifs, the Island of the Jews.
Theo: And burned.
Ada: Over a slow charcoal fire, so it takes a long time. And here the legend blazes up. The story goes that Molay, in the flames, summons both his persecutors. King Philip and Pope Clement, he cries, I call you to God's tribunal within the year.
Theo: And did they die?
Ada: Clement, the twentieth of April, a bowel ailment, barely a month later. Philip, the twenty-ninth of November, a stroke after a boar hunt. Both dead within eight months.
Theo: That's uncanny.
Ada: It's chilling. Now the record. The eyewitness, a royal clerk named Geoffroi de Paris, actually wrote down a general cry for God's vengeance, not a named summons. The precise one-year summons comes later, around thirteen twenty-eight, from an Italian chronicler, Ferreto of Vicenza, who put it in the mouth of an unnamed Italian Templar, not Molay.
Theo: So the curse grew in the retelling.
Ada: It did. But what's not legend is what came after. Philip's three sons died young, none left a male heir, and by thirteen twenty-eight the direct Capetian line was finished. The dynasty really did end.
Theo: Whether or not a dying man cursed it.
Ada: Molay's own recorded words were plain enough: God knows who is wrong, and misfortune will soon fall on those who condemned us. The ashes had barely settled into the river when Europe began to look at the date on the calendar.